"What Is Dispensationalism? The church has a new practice" Acts 2:38-47 Sunday Evening Worship Service

Let's open our Bibles now to the book of Acts, chapter 2, picking up kind of where we in the same chapter we left off at last week, although we're gonna jump over Peter's sermon uh in the middle of Acts 2.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

Maybe one day at the Lord Terries, we can get back and look at uh look at that sermon more carefully.

But I want to jump to the end of the uh Acts chapter 2, down to verse 42.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

Actually, I'll pick it, I'll pick it up down in uh verse 41.

I'll read it first.

Those who received his words, referencing Peter's sermon, were baptized.

And they were added that day about three thousand souls.

They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching, the fellowship, the breaking of bread, and the prayers, and awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done to the apostles.

All who believed were together and had all things in common, and they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all as any had need, and day by day attending the temple together and breaking bread in the homes, that received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people, and the Lord added to their number day by day those who are being saved.

If you drive along Braddock Road, you spy the Oakwood School that is under construction right now.

It's been under construction for a couple of years.

It's been dug up, and they laid uh some pipe down there, and then they had to dig it back up, and the county made them put it down and dig it up.

I think it's only ground three there.

Uh, they're expanding the building, um, and it's just it's a huge, huge project.

You see it probably.

Uh some of you, I'm sure, see it every every day as you drive by.

Uh, what you may not know, some of you may not know, is that that was originally Emmanuel Bible Church.

That's where Emmanuel Bible Church started.

That was the first building and worship center uh for the church.

Um church started, I believe, 58 years ago or something like that, um, 1967, so you can do the math on that.

Uh in January 7th is when they moved into that.

The Church Emmanuel Bible Church started at Lee High School, but they moved into that as their first building.

And you might be interested to know this.

You know the Oakwood School I'm talking about, the wood playground outside, you know what I'm talking about.

Uh, when Emmanuel Bible Church bought that and built it, the whole thing, property, building, everything$125,000.

Total cost.

Uh, that's probably how much it's costing them to dig up the pipes right now every week to fix those.

Um, the early 1980s when the church moved here to Braddock and Backlick, and the church met uh the worship center is now what is the gym.

And if you walk over into the gym now, it doesn't look very churchy, it looks very gymmy, that's how I would describe it.

Uh, that might not be a technical term.

I got to go on a tour of Oakwood School uh right before they started the construction.

Got to walk around the building and check it out.

And you could tell, the train's eye could tell that it is a church.

As you uh walk around looking at it, you can, you know, it looks schoolish now.

There's lockers and such, there's yearbooks and sport team pictures on the wall.

But you walk into what is their gym and you can recognize like that.

I'm pretty sure that looks like it was a baptismal over there.

Had kind of the wooden backing behind the uh the you know, the basketball courts there, and it had the stage up there that some schools have, and then it had what looks like a baptismal behind it.

So I went to investigate that more carefully, and lo and behold, behind a closet there are janitor supplies stored in a baptismal.

Like so many Baptist churches.

Okay.

The gym had the architecture of a church, of course.

Um, but it's not really a church, it's not a church at all anymore.

Um same with our gym.

It raises the question: what makes something a church?

Now, you've been around the block enough to know that the church isn't the building, it's the people.

You understand that.

But chase that down one more step on that road.

The church isn't the building, it's the people.

Okay, what makes the people the church?

Are any two Christians gathered together a church?

Are four Christians at Starbucks at church?

After all, the Lord said we're two or more gathered.

I'm there with you.

Church.

Take an offering at Starbucks, see what happens.

You understand that the church begins prophetically in Matthew 16, where Jesus says, I will build my church.

This is a very strong passage that maybe we can look at uh sometime where Jesus is prophesying the future church.

He says that he will build the church when Jesus declares that in Matthew 16, the church does not yet exist.

We're going through a series right now, a contrast of covenantalism, dispensationalism.

And as I gave you the overview of dispensationalism a few weeks ago, I said you could really boil dispensationalism down to kind of one basic point.

The church begins in Acts chapter 2, and it's not Israel.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

And that's it.

And there are some verses that I think teach that quite clearly, Matthew 16 being one of them.

Jesus speaks about the church in future terms.

I'm going to build it.

I will build it on the foundation of Peter and his apostolic preaching, on the foundation of Peter confessing that Jesus Christ is the Lord.

That becomes the cornerstone.

Of course, Jesus himself is the cornerstone, but that cornerstone is made manifest.

Titus says in Titus 1, verse 2 and 3, that cornerstone is made manifest through the preaching of the word.

Titus 1:2

And that's what Peter did.

And that's what we just uh skipped in Acts chapter 2 is Peter's sermon that launches the church.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

Of course, the Holy Spirit comes at the beginning of Acts 2, seals everybody, binds them together into one corporate body.

We looked at this last Lord's Day.

Now Peter fulfills Matthew 16 by preaching the gospel.

People are saved and they are added to the church.

This is a new thing.

It's starting right here with Jesus as the cornerstone.

The apostles' preaching is the foundation of it, and Jesus is building it like he said he would in Matthew 16.

That's what's happening here.

This is not the temple system, this is not the synagogue system.

The synagogues were not built on the foundation or the cornerstone of Christ as the Savior, and they certainly were not built on the foundation of apostolic preaching.

They predated the apostles.

We looked at a few weeks ago the parable of the bloody vineyard, where Jesus spoke against the Pharisees, saying, because of their rejection of Jesus and his ministry, their rejection that God, the vineyard owner, had sent his son to collect the rents.

They rejected him.

They would throw him out and kill him.

Jesus said that the vineyard would be taken from them and given to others.

That's again Jesus prophetically describing the foundation of the church.

That he's building it on Peter's preaching and the apostles.

They will be the foundation's the beginning.

You don't go retrofit a building with a new foundation.

If you're going to give it a new foundation, you demo it and you lay a new foundation.

And so Jesus describes the apostles' preaching as the foundation of it.

And here in Acts 2, we're seeing the church newly gathered.

Last week we saw the first activity of the church is the Holy Spirit came and sealed them and brought them in together.

And now we see the church growing dramatically.

You know, a hundred plus people at the beginning of the chapter, and now three thousand plus people at the end of the chapter.

This is church growth.

This is not the synagogue.

It's not the temple system.

It's a totally new structure.

And it is the church.

Now, what makes it the church?

I think there's marks here as we go through Acts the end of Acts chapter 2.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

There's descriptions of what are the signs of a true church, what makes a church a church, and I'll give them to you tonight.

Firstly, a true church has baptism.

A church that doesn't have baptism, I would say, is not a church.

This is the how these people are added to the church.

If you look at verse 41 of Acts chapter 2, those who received his word, meaning Peter, were baptized.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

And they were added that day about 3,000 souls.

So you see here, baptism is the connection to being added to the church.

Those people who were baptized, they were not in the upper room at the initiation of Pentecost.

They did not receive the Holy Spirit with the tongues of fire.

That wasn't something that happened to them.

That was how the church began with the apostles and the early disciples, the hundred plus people in the upper room.

They had the tongues of fire.

They had the baptism of the Spirit.

They were bound together that way.

Now you have new people being added to the church.

They weren't there on moment one of the church.

They came, you know, they weren't part of the launch team, but they came on launch Sunday to use the church planning lingo.

And they're now saved.

They respond in faith.

Now they hear Peter's sermon.

The Holy Spirit regenerates them, causes them to be born again, gives them faith.

They express their faith in Jesus Christ.

They believe Peter's preaching, Peter's confession of Christ as a Savior.

They believe it.

Now, how do they go from that person right there who believes the gospel, hears this, they're at the physical gathering of the church, they hear the gospel, they believe it.

How do they move from that point to being part of the church?

And the expression of that is baptism.

That's what they did.

It was the public demonstration, obviously, here, the public demonstration of their own personal conversion.

Not everybody who heard Peter's preaching was saved.

His word, the external call, went out, but the internal working of the Holy Spirit affected 3,000 plus people of that day, around 3,000 people, it says.

And they expressed their faith in conversion by baptism.

Baptism was the mark that brought them into the church.

It was the public declaration.

They're now identifying with believers.

So a true church has baptism.

And if you've been to Jerusalem, you've walked around the temple, uh this uh reading some old books, kind of, I think predating the 19 uh 60s or 70s or ever when the temple mount was able to be excavated.

You heard it used to be a common argument against believers' baptism that you hear these people at the temple and there's no place for them to get baptized.

Where would you how could you baptize 3,000 people at the temple?

So clearly it was pouring.

You can do, you know, cups and pour water in your head anywhere, but now that they've excavated much of the temple mount, you can go there and there are mikvas everywhere.

Everywhere.

And this is what the Jews would often do is they before they did a religious ritual, they would go through a kind of ritual purification.

The mikvas were immersion.

The Jews, I think, had a lot of superstitions about that, that the water had to touch every part of their body or they weren't uh purified.

Baptisms then, uh, especially in the early church, didn't happen with, you know, it wasn't a person who lowered you in the water.

You went in yourself.

You were demonstrating that you were baptized, being baptized of your own accord.

Nobody was forcing you.

The Jews, some of the Jews had this superstition that if somebody's hand touched you while you were being uh being going under the water, that part of you wasn't clean, that part of you wasn't purified.

A very um superstitious kind of behavior.

Well, they're everywhere there.

And so thousands of people are responding to the preaching of the word, and of course it would be natural for them to be, and the word here is baptized, but the word means immersed.

The word baptismo means to immerse immerse something or someone, and that's what happens here.

They're immersed likely in the mikvas to demonstrate they are now part of the church.

This is the door to church.

This is the stepping stone from kind of affiliating with the church on the outside to becoming a member of the church.

And let me just pause real quick and say that I'm I'm sure in a room this size there are people here that would say that they're Christians, and I mean I know how it happens.

You're invited to church by a friend or made to come by a parent, perhaps, and then over time you you just believe the message.

And then a year gives way to another year and gives way to another year, and then you're, you know, you've been in church for four or five years, and you would say you're a Christian, and you would say you're following the Lord, uh, but baptism, I mean, that's up there, and there's like everybody's looking at you, and you get wet, and that messes up your hair.

It's kind of weird and embarrassing, and you're standing in front of everybody.

So why would I have to do that?

Why can't I just keep coming to church?

Because that's the demonstration that you're going from being an observer and into being a participant, that you're going from being a spectator to being a believer.

That's what baptism demonstrates.

So that is the first mark of a true church.

For someone to be part of the church, they have to be baptized.

They have to be baptized.

And this is not circumcision, by the way.

Baptism did not um circumcision didn't evolve into baptism or become baptism.

Circumcision, if you remember, it comes from the Old Testament, Genesis 17, where God gives Abraham the Abrahamic covenant and then institutes circumcision as the sign of that covenant.

So circumcision was not something that was commemorating the new covenant, although it certainly had some symbolism that pointed towards the new covenant.

But circumcision was not initially connected to the new covenant, it was connected to the Abrahamic covenant.

Genesis 17 is very clear about that.

As a sign of the covenant, God tells Abraham, You will be circumcised.

And it was a particular sign for the Abrahamic covenant because the Abrahamic covenant was the promise that the seed would come from Abraham.

The seed would be the Savior who would crush the head of Satan and undo the devil's working in this world and usher in worship of the true God.

I mean, that's what the covenant was about.

It began, of course, with uh Adam and Eve after uh Abel was killed.

There was a promise to them that they would have a child who would be the offspring, who would crush the head of Satan at the fall, and then Abel, of course, was murdered, and they thought it would be Seth.

They even named Seth.

The word Seth means seed.

It wasn't Seth, though.

And there's this wondering who will be the Savior.

And circumcision comes in the world to say the Savior will come through Abraham.

He will come to the nation of Israel.

So it's a very, it's an ethnic mark.

It's starting with Abraham, and so everybody who's circumcised is passing along the seed.

It's only for the men, because the men are passing along the seed.

That's the idea behind this.

It's full of the ethnic implications.

It's an ethnic hope.

Now, part of it is a longing for a new covenant.

Of course, Deuteronomy chapter 10 foreshadowed this.

Deuteronomy 10 · chapter mention

Moses, in his farewell sermon of the Israelites, is kind of rebuking them because remember, he doesn't get to go to the promised land and he blames them for it.

Because they were wicked and rebellious and made him hit the rock.

You know, he's doing some blame shifting here.

But in his rebuke of them, he says, The day is coming when the Lord isn't going to be content just to circumcise you, but will circumcise your hearts.

This is Deuteronomy chapter 10.

Deuteronomy 10 · chapter mention

Jeremiah 9 points forward to that, Jeremiah 9, verse 25.

Jeremiah 9:25

Behold, the days are coming, declares Yahweh, when I will punish those, all those who are circumcised merely in the flesh.

So God is rebuking the Israelites, saying, You are stubborn, you're keeping the sign of the covenant.

The problem with the Israelites is it's nothing to do with circumcision.

They practice circumcision just fine.

But it wasn't that's a mark on the flesh.

It doesn't produce have spiritual benefit or value to it, other than an indication that you are part of the national, the ethnic group of people that are longing for the Savior, the Messiah to come.

That's ostensibly what it was representing.

So baptism doesn't really replace that in that sense.

The regeneration of the heart, I think, is what replaces circumcision.

Regeneration is the new heart.

The old the flesh is pulled away in the heart, and you're saved in that sense.

That's what happens.

Baptism is the demonstration of the circumcised heart.

It's not just for men, it's for men and women.

It's not a sign of future faith and hope.

It's a public declaration that you heard the preaching of the word and you believed.

That's what baptism represents.

You believed it.

Not that you will believe it one day.

Circumcision happened to the children.

It happened to the, you know, on the seventh to eighth day is when circumcision happened because it's pointing forward.

It wasn't dependent upon faith.

The Abrahamic covenant wasn't dependent upon faith of those who received circumcision.

There's a difference between true Israel and false Israel.

Circumcision represented all even of false Israel.

And that's not what baptism does.

Baptism doesn't represent both true and false church members.

Baptism represents that you have made a profession of faith and you're identifying yourself with the local church.

So I know how it happens.

You come to church and you just don't want to get baptized because years go by, but I would say like just do it.

You place your faith in Christ.

It's your time to stand before the congregation and say, I want to identify with the church.

I want to identify by being baptized.

I would say if you're baptized as an infant, you should be baptized as a believer.

Because the baptism as an infant uh is not representing your own faith, it's not your own affiliation or with the church.

This is why in covenantalism it's so so critical for them to have a distinction between the visible church and the invisible church, because there's a huge delta there.

The visible church has all kinds of non-believers in it because you're added to the church, you become a participant in some form of the new covenant apart from your own individual faith.

But I would disagree with that and say baptism is your entrance to the church, and it's for those who have had their hearts circumcised, have been regenerated in the flesh, and it's the outward expression or demonstration or profession of their conversion.

And it is a sign of a church.

It is the first sign of the church, it's the first thing the church does in Acts chapter 2, baptism.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

So, second sign of the church, leadership, verse 42, 42.

They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching.

The people are gathered together and they were devoted to the apostles' teaching.

This is a shift from what was happening in Judaism.

Judaism had the recognized priestly class.

So they had the Sanhedrin, they had the priests, they had those that could minister, but in a typical synagogue, the reading and the teaching that would happen in the synagogue, it was on a rotating basis kind of thing.

This is not the way the church is going to operate.

It's not going to rotate through everybody.

It's not something you're born into by ethnicity or by your tribe.

That's not the way it's going to happen.

It's going to be something that it's recognized from the church.

The church is recognizing that these are the leaders.

Now, here are the apostles.

That's all there are.

As you read through the book of Acts, understand the beginning of Acts chapter 2 is not like the instruction manual for how to do church, as much as it's descriptive of what they were doing.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

That's why it's so helpful for this kind of sermon, because it's describing what the early church was like.

But as you can work your way through the book of Acts and in the pastoral epistles, you get the prescriptive, like this is what you're supposed to do.

So in light of the description early in Acts, that they had apostles, they had leaders teaching them.

Apostles don't live forever, they die.

Some of them before others.

And as they're dying out, who replaces them?

What's the leadership structure of the church?

It's not going to be their descendants.

There's not an apostolic office that new people will fill in.

The apostles give way to elders in the church.

That becomes the New Testament model.

That's how you see it played out through the New Testament.

Ephesians chapter 4, verse 11.

Ephesians 4:11

It says it this way: He gave some, being God gave some as apostles, some as prophets, some as evangelists, and some as pastors and teachers for the equipping of the saints to the work of the service, to the building up of the body of Christ.

So God is gifting, this is in the context of Ephesians 4 of spiritual gifts, God through his Holy Spirit is gifting the church with some of these people.

Pastors here is a word for shepherd, someone who cares for the flock.

1 Timothy 3 gives qualifications for them.

So does Titus chapter 1.

Titus 1 · chapter mention

The idea is that these are people who are leading the church.

They have some form of authority in the church that you see described in Hebrews 13.

They're keeping watch over your souls, Paul says.

That's the leadership in the church.

A church has baptism that marks your entrance to it, and then it has an authority structure of pastors and elders who are shepherding the congregation.

The point in Acts chapter 2 is not so much what they're called, rather, the fact that godly, qualified men were the leaders and the teachers in the congregation.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

They were the ones doing the teaching.

They were the ones recognized as leading the church.

A church without elders is a group of people meeting together.

A plane without a pilot, hopefully, is parked.

A group of Christians gathering together, I encourage that.

I encourage fellowship.

I encourage Bible studies.

I encourage you getting together with your friends at Starbucks or in your house or whatever.

The more Bible studies, the better.

Amen.

But that's not church.

Church has elders and leadership.

The leadership of the church is recognized by the church.

Where the elders look at the lives of people who want to be elders and examine them and say these people are functioning like elders, they have the qualifications of elders, we're identify them as elders, and the elders watch over the flock.

This is seen all through the book of Acts.

By the way, and the rest of the New Testament.

Wherever Paul goes to a place, he establishes elders there.

Even in the book of Acts, he goes to Ephesus and labors in Ephesus.

And when he leaves them, you know, a tearful scene in the book of Acts, Paul's weeping over the church at Ephesus as he hands them off to the elders.

And he gives strict charge to the elders to keep watch over the flock.

The elders are the teachers.

They're the ones who set the tone, who guard the flock, they feed the flock, they shepherd the flock.

They're the essential, an essential part of the church.

They don't, they're not the tribes.

They're not the twelve tribes of Israel.

This is why I want I just want you to appreciate that the church is new.

This is a concept, it's not in the Old Testament.

Do you understand that?

Moses didn't have this concept.

He had the tribes, and the tribes had representatives, and they appointed other representatives, and that was a way to dispense communication.

That was not how Israel was led.

And those leaders were not shepherding the people.

This is the lament over and over again in the Old Testament.

They had no shepherds.

In the New Testament, it's not like that.

Paul tells Titus, you appoint elders in every city.

And Titus is, you know, in Crete, and Paul tells Crete is a new church.

They're immature, they're liars and gluttons and lazy people, and you know, it's not a healthy place.

But people are getting saved, and Titus is looking around saying, I don't see any of these people as elder qualified.

And Paul tells Titus, oh, it's okay, they don't really need elders then.

No, he doesn't say that.

Paul tells Titus, find the godliest dudes you can.

Okay, if they're all down here, find the ones that are at the top of down there and make them the elders.

Do something.

Because the church needs elders.

You can see the godliness of a church by the godliness of its elders.

I believe that that's true.

You can see the maturity of a church by the maturity of its elders.

The sobriety of a church by the sobriety of the elders.

I mean, they're setting the tone.

The prayerfulness of the church by the prayerfulness of the elders.

They're an essential part of the church.

And so, as I mentioned, the elders are not priests, they're leaders.

They're not the priests of the church, they're not the prophets of the church, they are the leaders and the shepherds of the church.

Psalm 23 gives you a contrast.

In the Old Testament, the shepherd of the people was Yahweh.

He was the shepherd of the sheep.

That much is clear.

Then you get to Ezekiel 34, where Yahweh laments that the leaders of Israel are bad shepherds.

They're fleecing the sheep and eating them.

They're supposed to guard the sheep, Ezekiel 34 says.

Instead, the shepherds are exploiting them, profiting off of them.

They're not feeding them, and then they're slaughtering them.

And the Ezekiel 34, God calls those false shepherds to repent, to put their faith in God.

It's a pretty basic requirement.

If you're going to be a shepherd, you need to feed the sheep.

There's not a lot on the shepherd's to-do list.

Shepherd wakes up in the morning, count the sheep, get them food, get them watered, don't let the wolves get them.

So it's a pretty short list.

I'm sure it's very difficult and more complicated than that.

But the bottom line is you have to feed the sheep.

The shepherds, so-called shepherds in the Old Testament, were not feeding the sheep.

They were rebuked by God.

Ezekiel 34, God says, I'm going to cut them off.

Then I'm going to come as their true shepherd.

Jesus identifies himself that way.

When he comes, and in John, he says that he is the shepherd of the sheep.

John chapter 10, he proclaims himself to be the good shepherd.

John 10 · chapter mention

He will lay his life down for the sheep.

He is the true shepherd.

He's the shepherd prophesied in Ezekiel 34.

The shepherd prophesied in Psalm 23.

He's it.

So if it ended there, that would be pretty strong continuity between the Old Testament and the New Testament.

The Old Testament laments the lack of a shepherd.

Jesus is the shepherd, fulfilling the shepherd motif.

Period.

Let's go home.

But that's not where it ends.

The New Testament picks up that shepherding motif and doesn't find it located ultimately and finally in Jesus, but finds the shepherding of Jesus manifested and displayed in the church through the pastors and elders.

The word pastor just means shepherd.

And it's played out through the rest of the New Testament.

The elders are called shepherds or pastors.

Paul calls them pastors.

1 Timothy 5, Peter refers to them as pastors.

He says, I exhort the elders among you.

As a fellow elder and the witness of the sufferings of Christ, as a partaker of the glory that's going to be revealed, shepherd or pastor the flock of God that's among you.

Exercising oversight.

Not under compulsion, but willingly.

Don't do it for money, but do it because you want to.

And don't be a jerk about it.

He says, not domineering those under your charge, but be examples to the flock.

And when the chief shepherd appears, you'll receive the unfading crown of glory.

So the New Testament is seeing the shepherd metaphor expanded.

So Old Testament, Yahweh is a shepherd, the Israelites, bad shepherds.

God comes, true shepherd, lays his life down.

Jesus dies on the cross as the true shepherd of the sheep, resurrects, ascends to heaven where he dwells at this moment, and he doesn't leave us a sheep without a shepherd.

That's how the end of Zechariah ends.

Remember, the shepherd will be struck, the sheep will scatter.

That happens in the Garden of Gethsemane.

The shepherd is struck, ultimately crucified, ascends to heaven.

Sheep are not scattered, though, because the Holy Spirit binds us together, and then God raises up shepherds from the midst of the congregation to watch over them.

That's a new covenant reality.

The elders do not replace Levites.

There's the priest of all believers.

Every believer is a priest in that sense.

Jesus is the high priest.

That's not the metaphor here.

This is a new thing.

This concept doesn't really function in the Old Testament, except negatively.

In the New Testament, this should be normal for it, shouldn't be an exception that a church has godly men as elders.

It should be normal Christian New Covenant church.

So, the true church is baptism, leadership.

These next ones are just gonna have to go faster.

That's the bottom line.

Third mark of a true church is doctrine.

Doctrine.

They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching.

Every church has, and this word teaching here could also be rendered doctrine.

Every church has doctrine.

Here in the book of Acts, the very first church gathering.

This is what they're this is what they're about.

They're coming together.

I think of kind of the what a contrast this is.

This is kind of some kind of the cheesy advertisements for uh cheesy churches.

You know, we're here a place for authentic life where we just you can be transparent and authentic and authentic and transparent.

And you know, the most important thing of this church is come as you are.

That's what this is really important, is that you come as you are, so we can live authentic lives one with another.

Um what a contrast with Acts chapter 2.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

And the church didn't come to uh come as you are.

That's not that's not what bound them together.

The church came to be devoted to the doctrine of the apostles, the apostles' teaching.

And you're gonna see that played out all through the book of Acts.

This is the command for elders to guard their lives and their doctrine.

This exists in some sense uh the churches that are gathered together here, they don't have the apostles, or they don't have the gospels yet.

They're not studying Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

They don't have those haven't been written.

But Acts chapter 2, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John have not been written yet.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

Instead, they have the men who heard those sermons, they have the men who heard Jesus' preaching, and so they're gathered together to listen to them.

But as the New Testament began to be written, you see this shift start to happen away from the apostles' teaching from their own lips and into faithful people who were entrusted by the apostles to teach the word of God.

Do you see that change?

So instead of it just being you gather around Peter's feet and say, Hey, tell us that one time where, you know, tell us about when Jesus said he was the true shepherd, and Jesus would teach on that.

That's going to give way to John writing his gospel, and now Paul telling Timothy and others, you raise up people that can take Luke's gospel in Timothy's example.

Paul is telling Timothy, take somebody, train somebody to take Luke's gospel and be able to teach that.

Because you don't have the apostles with you, they're dying.

So you need men that can teach the word and develop doctrine from that.

The scripture is being written, that's how this devotion turned.

It turns away from the apostles into the word of God.

You see this described somewhat in 2 Timothy 4.

I solemnly charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who's going to judge the living and the dead and by his appearing in his kingdom.

And I just want you to just marvel at 2 Timothy 4, verse 1.

2 Timothy 4:1

It's one of those just fantastic lines in the Bible.

The Bible, nothing in the Bible needs an intro like that.

Paul can just say something and it's true.

So he verse 1 is totally unnecessary.

You don't need any of that.

And yet he writes it there to show you what's happening in verse 2 is like extra special.

Pay close attention to this.

And then he underlines it.

I mean, just count how many ways.

He doesn't just say, I charge you.

He says, which he does say I charge you, but he says, I solemnly charge you.

That's a twofold charge.

In the presence of God, I mean that makes it triple important.

And the presence of God and of Christ Jesus.

It's a fourfold importance right there.

Who's going to judge the living?

I mean, this is, he doesn't need to say any of that.

That's five little things he's adding.

Oh, and he's going to judge the dead, that's the sixth thing, and by his appearing, that's a seventh, and by his kingdom.

So there's eight little admonitions here that are leading you into the charge.

And the charge is preach the word.

For elders and pastors should preach the word, to be ready in season, out of season, reprove, rebuke, exhort, great patience and instruction.

This is what binds the church together.

If you're familiar with 2 Timothy, Paul's about to, after that, lament how people in his day are not clinging to the word of God.

They're finding teachers that tickle their ears.

In contrast, Timothy should preach the word in season and out of season.

Paul tells the Corinthians, for this reason I sent Timothy to you, who's my beloved and faithful child in the Lord, and he will remind you of my ways, which are in Christ, just as I teach everywhere in every church.

You see the handoff happening here.

Paul was discipled by the apostles.

Paul becomes, in this sense, an apostle sent to the Gentiles.

He's training up Timothy.

He gives Timothy Luke's gospel.

Timothy takes Luke's gospel, he begins teaching it.

Paul tells Timothy, You're going to go around to the Corinthians.

I mean, these guys are hopeless.

Go to them.

Spend time with them.

Everywhere in every church.

And I could put another dozen verses on the screen about this, but I won't.

The point is that a true church is devoted to doctrine.

It has a statement of faith, it has expressly worded and well-reasoned propositions about what the church believes.

The leadership labors over the doctrine, and that's what's presented to the world.

And the church believes it.

And the church without doctrine is not a church.

So again, group of Christians meeting together at Starbucks.

Even if they were to grab baptism, great.

And even if they were to appoint an elder, great.

Still, they need doctrine.

You need to have what you're gathered around, what defines you doctrinally.

Fourth.

They have the teaching and they have the fellowship.

If Jesus is the head of the church and the doctrine is the bones of the church, and the believers are the body of the church, then fellowship is the life of the church.

So Jesus is our head.

Our church has a structure to it, and the fellowship of the church is what gives that structure life.

If you want to make a new friend, you can't go into the mall and befriend a mannequin.

The mannequin won't talk back.

And for a while, the mannequin might be a good listener to you.

But eventually you're going to want to hear something in exchange, and the mannequin won't do it.

A body in a morgue, not a good friend.

And not alive.

A church without fellowship is a dead church.

A church without people who love each other and care for one another is a dead church.

And this is one of the difference between a university class on religion and a church.

You can take a university class on religion, liberty.

Go to a good school that has a religion class, and you can go there, and the guy teaching the class might be elder qualified, and the people in the class might be baptized, and liberty might have a statement of faith, but it's not this kind of church body fellowship that you have there.

A church is different than a Bible class.

There's a love and a preference for one another over each other, and it's supernatural because the people in the church are not, you know, in a Bible class, the people are generally the same age.

Not in a church.

You guys are all looking out here, you guys are all different ages.

You're all over the map out here.

I'm not going to point or anything, but it's it's all over the map.

You guys are all different ethnicities and different income levels, and you live in different places.

You don't have for the most part, you guys don't have anything in common.

Except the Lord.

And the Lord binds you together in this church.

That's what you have in common.

If you guys just sat next to each other in an airplane, you've you likely wouldn't even be friends.

But because you have a common faith expressed through a common church, there's life in the church.

And this is so hard in big churches, which is why you're all here at Sunday night and I love it so bad.

You know, the bigger the church is, the smaller it has to feel.

The more people that are at church, the smaller it has to be.

And there's some people say, I can only go to a small church.

You'd have a problem then, because Acts chapter 2, she's got 3,000 people.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

The first day they're together, they're bigger than IBC is.

It's not really about the size of the church, but it's about the fellowship of the church.

A church of 100 can't break into groups of 40 or 20 or 10 without seeming cliquish, but this is why I like I like a bigger, I like a church the size of IBC, because we can break into groups without seeming cliquish.

We can't have ABFs that are different life stages, and it doesn't seem clickish because the church is big enough to do that and have real fellowship in real life.

And you see that all over the New Testament.

The New Testament fills us out with life-on-life discipleship.

And then I hope you see that it's all supernatural.

It's the indwelling of the Holy Spirit that does that.

That does that.

And I'd encourage you if you have a hard time developing relationships in the church, you know, there's not an ABF that meets your preferred demographic or whatever, uh, that you would just strive to be friends with people in the church, strive to make relationships with those in the church as best you're able.

And I think people generally reciprocate that, and that helps you have this life-on-life fellowship that's in the church.

It's described here, Acts chapter 2, verse 42, right out the gate.

Acts 2:42

Number five, true church has communion.

The breaking of bread, it says in verse 42, they're fellowshipping one to another.

True church practices communion.

I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this because we do communion often here, and I, you know, try to talk about a different element just about every time we do it.

But every church should practice communion.

It is a form of fellowship.

It's a public demonstration of us being united together because there's one bread and there's one cup, and we all participate in that.

We take together at the same time.

So, you know, in a sense, communion takes the place of Passover differently than baptism and circumcision relate.

I'm saying that uh the communion is different than that, but communion does take, in a sense, the fulfillment of Passover.

Passover was pointing backwards to how God led them out of Egypt.

So you slaughtered the lamb, blood on the doorpost, God passes over your house.

That's why it's called Passover.

God leads them across the Red Sea into the wilderness.

They're supposed to celebrate Passover while they're in the wilderness as they're looking forward ahead.

They get to the Promised Land.

Deuteronomy says, Deuteronomy 16, I believe, says, when you enter the promised land, you may not pass, celebrate Passover wherever you want to.

It will be localized in one spot.

You only will celebrate Passover in the city where the Lord chooses to set his name.

Speaking of Jerusalem, that's where you'll celebrate Passover.

So it had a very forward-looking element to it.

They're wondering, where is this going to be?

Where will we celebrate Passover?

Where will we keep it?

And celebrating it in Jerusalem is, of course, preparing the way for Jesus to come.

And by the by Deuteronomy 16, what had already happened is Abraham had already offered Isaac on that same mountain, by the way.

Isaac had already been offered.

God stopped the blade.

God would provide the sacrifice.

God spared Isaac's life.

So it's already in God's mind.

God has already picked the real estate where this will go down.

Now they're about to cross in the promised land.

You don't get to celebrate Passover anywhere.

It's got to be in Jerusalem because it's setting up Christ so that Jesus can go and he can be the final Passover lamb.

So it's looking forward to Jesus, looking backwards to the flight from Egypt, looking forward to Jesus.

That's all in view here.

Communion eclipses that in the sense Jesus celebrates the last Passover, says, I won't celebrate this anymore until I'm in my kingdom, looking forward to the kingdom.

You, however, as the church, will celebrate communion.

So church doesn't celebrate Passover, we celebrate communion.

We take the bread, we take the wine, we have that kind of fellowship together, pointing backwards to Jesus' death.

We talk about his body and his blood, and pointing forward to the returning of Christ.

1 Corinthians 11, 26.

As often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

So communion has that twofold dynamic as well.

Looking backwards to Jesus' death, looking forward to his return every time we celebrate it.

We should do this often, Paul says.

Now, again, Acts 2 here is descriptive, not prescriptive.

So it seems, you read Acts 2, verse 42, it's just described as the breaking of bread.

Acts 2:42

It was likely more like some kind of meal.

But by the growth of the church, and by the time you get to the epistles, it seems to have settled into something much more like what we do at Emmanuel.

That's what a true church does.

It has that kind of fellowship and vibrancy and communion to it as an outgrowth of that fellowship.

True church has prayer.

This is where verse 42 ends.

And the prayers.

A church is devoted to prayer because they recognize the God as it works supernaturally.

This is a key point.

The church functions through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

It's a supernatural entity.

You can't engineer this.

You cannot engineer church growth.

I mean, you can engineer drawing a crowd and drawing people, but that's not the same thing as drawing a church, and I hope you all all know that.

You can do things at a church to increase numbers and attendance.

You can give away cars if you want, Oprah style church growth ministry right there.

But that's not a church.

You can draw a crowd.

There's ways to draw a crowd.

That's not drawing a church.

The Lord is the one who builds the church.

He determines who's part of a church.

He's the one that brings people to church.

The Lord is sovereign over who's at a church.

The Lord's sovereign over what churches grow and what churches don't, over the size of a church, why some churches are big and some churches are small.

It's entirely the Lord's work, not ours.

We can't engineer that.

And part of a church being devoted to prayer is the confession of that.

That you pray, confessing, this is God who builds the church, not us.

We do the work of the ministry, of course, but it's the Lord who is working through us.

It's all his sovereignty.

So prayer marks a church.

Prayer is what distinguishes every Christian prays, but when a church is marked by prayer, that's what distinguishes it from like a religious organization or business.

That we recognize what we're doing here is supernatural, fueled by the Lord.

And that's going to be played out all through the book of Acts.

You know, the book of Acts is one supernatural story after another.

As the church gathers, they're marked by these things.

They're marked by prayer as well.

I mean, by worship as well.

A true church is going to gather together and worship.

You see this in verse 43.

Awe comes upon every soul.

Wonders and signs are being done to the apostles.

And uh I don't think that is something that's repeatable because we're not apostles.

Remember, they die off.

But all who believed were together, had they all had things in common.

They're generous towards one another.

Just look at all the happy words in verse 45.

They were selling their possessions and belonging, disturbing to everybody who had need, day by day, attending the temple together, breaking bread in their homes, receiving their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God.

I mean, that could have made this list much longer going through that.

I mean, the churches meeting each other's needs, they're generous.

Nobody's starving in the church because they're sharing all their possessions.

That should be true on a global scale.

I know at IBC we don't have people that are starving necessarily, and if you are, come talk to us because we have food.

But like on a global scale, there's churches in poorer areas that are struggling, and we send them money and we send them food and we work there to so the body of Christ cares for itself.

And that's what's happening in Acts 2.

They're meeting each other's needs.

I've talked a lot about that before, so I don't want to spend too much time on that.

But the gist of all this, they're meeting each other's needs, selling things, but they're happy, they're glad.

I mean, that's unusual.

Like, here's my stuff, I'm giving it away, and I'm so happy to do it.

That's supernatural and unusual.

And then verse 47, they're praising God.

They're just worshiping.

They praise the Lord through all this.

The apostles are doing signs and wonders, they're giving away their things, they're being baptized, they're having communion, they're studying the doctrine of the Old Testament, which is gonna give way to the New Testament, they're raising up elders from the congregation.

I mean, this is a busy, busy time, and the defining word of all of it, I think, is just worship, verse 47.

They are praising God, they're worshiping.

And when you have all those things together, when you have baptism and leadership, elders and doctrine and fellowship, communion and prayer and worship, the end of verse 47 should be true.

The Lord's adding to their number day by day those who are being saved.

I mean, that has been true for 2,000 years.

The apostles died out, but the church didn't die out.

The people that were reading about in Acts chapter 2, those 3,000, they died out, but the church didn't die out.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

God keeps adding numbers to the church.

God keeps growing the church.

And this church had met publicly before you see that in Acts chapter 3.

Acts 3 · chapter mention

They were meeting in the portico, the footsteps of the temple, a massive place to get to see thousands of people.

That's where the church was meeting.

And during the week they'd go into each other's homes, they would get together to worship and celebrate the resurrection of Christ.

Persecution is going to come, they're going to flee.

But this is the first generation church, the Lord giving the growth.

And you see how they fought, and you see how they were persecuted through the book of Acts, and how they passed down the gospel to the next generation, and the next generation received it.

Paul handed it to Titus, he ran with it, the third generation received it.

By the time Jesus writes to his churches in the book of Revelation, 50 years later, yeah, I mean you're generation after generation, just inside of the New Testament.

We take for granted at Emmanuel Bible Church so many of the blessings the Lord has given us.

I mean, uh, think of that, just looking at Oakwood School, driving.

I mean by it.

God has blessed us with elders that devoted themselves to doctrine and made our doctrinal statement.

There raised up a massive number of elders at our church that are godly men.

And it gets passed along to the next generation.

And the church grows.

This is the Lord blessing it.

And I want to, you know, we can sometimes complain or grumble about parking and have to take the shuttle across or I don't like that music stuff.

Winds Band Sunday again.

But we recognize just the incredible effort and intensity that goes through these things to give us the kind of church that we have right now.

I'm so grateful for the Lord to it.

My main point in addressing this tonight is just to try to draw out to you that list of things on the board.

I mean, some of them are true in the Old Testament.

The Old Testament should have been marked by worship.

There was a kind of fellowship in the Psalms of Ascent, as the people sang coming back from exile.

But for the most part, you look at this and you see what's happening in Acts 2, and nothing like this ever happened before.

There's never a group of people in the Bible that were knit together through baptism, raising up elders and developing their own doctrinal kind of statement and communion, of course.

This has never happened before.

And yet it becomes normative for the church.

It's what every church should be like.

Praise God that we have a church like this.

Lord, we're grateful for your word.

We don't want to lose sight of the fact of Jesus Christ who is crucified and resurrected on our behalf.

This is why we sing, it's why we studied the word.

It's why the early church was gathered together.

It was the content of Peter's preaching, the sermon, that the Savior would suffer and die and resurrect.

That's David's tent would fall and then be raised again.

The Holy Spirit would come and bring judgment on Israel and yet graft in the Gentiles and launch the church.

So we receive that.

We don't look at this and exalt ourselves over the Jews or over the Old Testament.

We don't receive this even to say there's two peoples of God or anything like that.

We receive this with gratitude, knowing that you have caused every generation from Adam forward to have people in it of faith who believe your word.

Even when those people were few, eight on a boat at one point.

Even when they were few, you kept yourself alive.

You always had the knees of those who didn't bow to Baal.

You had your people in every generation.

But now, Lord, you have caused the flood banks to break.

We relish in the newness of it, even though we're in year 2000 of it.

We relish the newness of it, the novelty of it in redemptive history, the wonderful design, that you're the architect and you built a place like this.

This is your plan, and we're grateful for it.

We're happy to be participants of it.

We pray for courage as we take the gospel to the world.

As we proclaim the death and resurrection of Christ through our congregation gathered to the songs we sing, we pray that you would be magnified in it.

We ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

And now, for a parting word from Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thanks for joining us.

If you're in the Washington, D.C.

area, I would love to see you at Emmanuel Bible Church.

For more information on our church or our current service times, go to IBC.church.

For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to TMS.edu.

I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel with boldness.